The Road from Xi’an to Bishkek

I left Kyrgyzstan in 2005, at the age of eighteen. I returned in 2016, at twenty-seven. Between those two dates were two Chinese cities, a language learned from zero, two degrees, companies built and managed, and a personal transformation the teenager who left home could not have imagined.

The road was not straight.

First came Xi’an — one year of language preparation at Northwestern Polytechnical University. Then Hangzhou, which became home for almost a decade. There was also a brief trip to Sweden for a trade exhibition. And then, eventually, Bishkek — a city that felt familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

What China Gave

China gave me speed.

Business culture in Zhejiang moves quickly. Hangzhou, Yuyao, Ningbo, and the surrounding industrial cities have a manufacturing density that changes how you think. An idea discussed on Monday can become a sample or prototype by Friday. Not because people are reckless, but because the infrastructure is there: factories, suppliers, workshops, logistics, engineers, and people who know how to make things happen.

That pace became part of me.

When I returned to Kyrgyzstan and saw procurement processes that took months for decisions that could have taken days, I had a new benchmark. Not everything should move at Hangzhou speed. Some decisions need time. Some risks need careful review. But once you have seen what fast and organized execution looks like, you can recognize the difference between necessary caution and unnecessary delay.

China also gave me tolerance for discomfort.

The first year was hard in ways I could not fully explain at the time — partly because I did not yet have the language to explain it. Being young, foreign, and broke in a city of millions teaches you that embarrassment is survivable. Mispronouncing words. Getting lost. Ordering food without knowing what it was. Taking the wrong bus. Trying again the next day.

None of it was fatal. Slowly, embarrassment became competence.

What Home Looked Like After

Bishkek in 2016 was not the same city I had left. Two revolutions had happened. The political landscape had changed. The country had changed.

But physically, much of it looked the same: the mountains behind the city, the Soviet grid, the bazaars, the familiar rhythm of the streets. The real dissonance was not in the city. It was inside me.

I was thinking in several languages. I was measuring business pace against Hangzhou. I had spent almost a decade in a place where, if something did not work, someone usually found a way to fix it by Thursday.

Kyrgyzstan worked differently.

Things often took time not because people were lazy, but because the systems around them — banking, logistics, regulation, infrastructure — had been built for another era and had not fully caught up. Understanding that distinction was important. It helped me avoid simple judgments and look deeper into how organizations actually function.

But there was another reality I also had to face: the old way of doing business. In some situations, decisions were shaped not only by efficiency, logic, or the interests of the enterprise, but by personal influence, informal pressure, and competing interests. I often found myself in conflict with officials and senior representatives of other companies whose expectations did not match my understanding of transparent and disciplined management.

Those moments tested me.

My experience in China became a pillar. It taught me that systems can work, that speed and discipline are possible, and that problems do not always need to be accepted as permanent. At the same time, it taught me flexibility. I learned that resilience is not only about standing firm against pressure. Sometimes it is also about moving like water — avoiding unnecessary confrontation, flowing around obstacles, and still reaching the objective without bending to an outdated vision.

My first year back was connected to a legal services company. It was not yet a final direction, more like a transitional period — a way to stay active while I was still trying to understand where my decade of China experience could be useful.

The answer came through industry. Then mining.

What Distance Taught

Living abroad for a long time and then coming home gives you a kind of double vision.

You see what works because you have lived somewhere it works differently. You see what is broken because you have seen it fixed elsewhere. And with time, you also begin to see what is valuable precisely because it is different.

Kyrgyzstan has something that Chinese business culture values the same way: personal trust at scale.

In a country of six or seven million people, networks are close. When someone trustworthy vouches for you, it carries weight across industries. At its worst, this can become favoritism. But at its best, it is social infrastructure — a way for things to move when formal systems are slow, incomplete, or overloaded.

That trust mattered when I entered the mining sector. My move into mining came through collaboration with a Chinese investor developing an industrial project in Kyrgyzstan. My background in China, my ability to communicate across cultures, and my understanding of manufacturing, equipment supply, and local realities helped connect the investor’s vision with practical execution on the ground.

Later, at Makmal Gold Company, that same kind of trust became even more important. A Chairman of the Board cannot work effectively through authority alone. It needs credibility beyond the company walls — with shareholders, managers, government representatives, partners and workers.